Healthcare providers manage patient treatment information in a variety of forms, ranging from completely automated electronic healthcare record management systems to paper files. Discovery of possibly significant information about a patient is ineffective and likely to be incomplete since most patients utilize a variety of providers which in turn utilize a variety of incompatible record management systems. Searching for medically relevant records for a particular patient is hampered by the number of previous healthcare providers that have treated a patient, and likely to be dangerously incomplete. A recent US government initiative to compel all healthcare providers to implement electronic healthcare record management systems by 2014 does not address and will not solve the problem of identifying all previous treatment and diagnosis information.
There are numerous reasons why a simple search of the web using Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine would not provide equivalent results to the invention. First, search engines focus on public information openly displayed on searchable pages. A search for a patient identifier such as its social security number (“SSN”) might return thousands of records containing that number in completely unrelated web pages, even assuming that the medical record information were exposed and indexed by search engines. But health care records must be protected by adequate security, behind at least password protected barriers. In order to search electronic health care record systems each search engine would have to have gained access to those systems with appropriate security measures. Consequently, simple searchers would have to be particularized to specific web sites corresponding to health care providers, which is a feature of the invention but not available in search engines since they assume they will search all web pages not restricted by the convention “nosearch” on the page URL.
Second, even if search engines had particularized, security controlled access to a defined set of health care provider systems, the patient identifier would not necessarily be the first information in a record, or in a standard location. The search engines would have to do a deep search of every record in every system looking for all occurrences of the patient identifier or SSN. This would depend on patient identifier numbers being readily found and identified, and could also return records for dependents, parents, or other relatives included, meaning that the results of the search could be incomplete or overloaded with possibly extraneous records. Information on date of service and diagnostic code or prescription information would also have to be deduced from the contents of each record.
Third, results returned would be incomplete since the majority of health care providers have not converted to electronic health care record systems, and have no medical record information to offer up to a search engine. A federal requirement is that all health care providers must use such systems by 2014, but there is no requirement far providers to convert all older records. Consequently, even if a particularized search was available, and patient identifiers could identify records of interest, this would not reach all health care providers until 2014 at the earliest, and would not necessarily provide records of previous health care records.
Finally, even if there were a particularized and secure search of health care providers available, and even if the basic information of patient ID, date of service and diagnostic code could be found by searching records, and even if all health care providers had converted to electronic record management systems, and even if those records could be returned in a consistent form, the variety of electronic health care record formats would make the results difficult to scan for particular information, difficult to search in date order, and difficult to easily determine which records may be of interest based on the diagnostic or treatment code, since records and record fields will vary from system to system.